What is an Eating Disorder?

For the majority of sufferers, eating disorders have very little to do with food. They may begin as a diet, or can be born out of feelings of body inadequacy, but they ultimately become something very different.

The desire to lose weight, or an obsession with destructive behaviour around food and exercise becomes all-consuming and completely infiltrates every aspect of the sufferer’s life. This in turn affects the sufferer professionally and socially and can be incredibly strenuous for their friends and family.

First and foremost, eating disorders are an addiction. The sufferer becomes addicted to starvation, binge eating and/or purging and other destructive habits and the feelings of power or control they might initially bring. Repeated disordered eating (refusing food, making onself sick, taking huge quantities of duiretics or laxatives or even taking illegal drugs in a bid to lose weight) then becomes a habit, ingrained in the unconscious brain (bad programming, which can be removed by Neural Recoding).

However, eating disorders are far more complex than simply being an addiction or habit. Firstly, malnutrition often leads to depression and mood swings – So the issue takes on another dimension and often becomes a vicious circle – feelings of depression cause the sufferer to take temporary solace in disordered eating which in turn makes them depressed.

Secondly, an eating disorder is usually born out of complex emotional issues which may have their root in childhood or traumatic past experiences. It could be a lack of confidence, fear of growing up (common in anorexics, who maintain a child-like body as a protest against facing reality), body dysmorphia (see an entirely distorted self image which is ugly or distasteful to the sufferer) or feelings of life being out of control. There are a myriad of other emotional root causes, which are unique to each individual.

Another huge part of having an eating disorder is the issue becoming the sufferer’s identity. They will define themselves as, for example, an anorexic or bulimic and this act of defining becomes a self limiting belief, ingrained in the unconscious, as they are convinced they can never move on and be free from their disorder.

Understanding Eating Disorders

You may find this 1.5 hour recording of an interview between Mark and Natasha useful, in which they outline what Eating Disorders really are, the common sources for them, why traditional modern medicine approaches won’t work and how and why Neural Recoding does work.

This CD is ideal for ED sufferers who are frustrated by the current medical approach and can’t see a way out; for parents whose children have ED’s to give them an understanding of what their child is going through; for ex-sufferers who have beaten the behaviour, but who still have extreme anxiety around food.